While having access to a massive variety of advertising options can be a marketer's dream come true, it can also make getting started a daunting task. If you're feeling overwhelmed, check out the following six types of Facebook ads see how you can apply them to your own business.

1. Lead Generation Ads

The lead generation ad unit makes the process of collecting email addresses and building email lists incredibly easy. With this ad unit, your prospects can sign up for an email list (among other things) with about as much effort as it takes to like or share a post.

The beauty of this ad unit is that Facebook auto-populates most of the fields that a prospect would normally have to fill out manually, which makes them much more likely to follow through.

If you are looking to grow your email list, lead generation ads are a great option. You can now use Zapier to connect your lead generation ad with your email provider. New contacts will automatically be added to one of your lists and entered into an automated workflow that you have created.

This ad unit connects your store’s product catalog with your Facebook ad account and pixel. When someone visits your site and then logs into Facebook, they will see an ad that features the same products they work looking at on your website. As a result, the ad they see is incredibly personalized and relevant.

To create a Dynamic Product Ad, use the Product Catalog Sales ad objective. My guess is it will quickly become your favorite ad type. Here’s why:

Incredibly personalized

When you run a DPA, the copy is the same for everyone that sees the ad, but the creative is 100% unique and personalized based on the respective viewers’ behavior on your website.

Campaigns Can Run Indefinitely

If you run a lot of ads, you know how time-consuming it can be to refresh your creative, but that’s a thing of the past now. With DPA's you can set it and forget it. Just forget to monitor performance!

Can Achieve Multiple Objectives

With DPAs you can choose four different audiences to target:

viewed but not purchased

added to cart but not purchased

upsell products

cross-sell products

Based on the audience you select, the ad will be automatically optimized for each objective. Once again, this saves you time and leads to better results.

Incredible Results

Many of Facebook’s largest marketing partners are seeing amazing results with DPAs. Adphorus, a Facebook marketing partner that represents some of the largest travel brands, saw a 3x increase in conversion rates and a 65% decrease in CPCs by using DPAs. It’s easy to understand why the ROI is so high given that it’s the most personalized, targeted and relevant ad businesses can run—short of creating a unique ad for every Facebook user.

3. Abandoned Cart Ads

How do you get these shoppers back to your store so they can complete their purchase? If you said by email, you are partially correct. Unfortunately, fewer than 10% of website visitors will give you their email address. That means you can contact one of the seven people who abandoned their cart (if you’re lucky), which still leaves six hot leads that you have no way of contacting.

Thankfully, with retargeting you can run a highly personalized Facebook ad targeting these individuals. These ads typically offer an incentive, such as free shipping or 10% off, if the person returns to complete their purchase.

I have found that using a fun video for this type of ad delivers even more impressive results. I am currently running an abandoned cart ad for Startup Drugz, which features a 30-second video of me telling the viewer that carts have feelings, and they are hurt when someone abandons them. It may sound silly but this campaign has a 20X return on investment.

4. Customer Thank You Ads

Many business owners have a bad habit of putting all of their marketing efforts into turning leads into customers—and stopping there! This is a huge mistake. It is much easier to turn a first-time customer into a repeat customer it is to turn a cold lead into a first-time customer. In fact, it’s 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one.

This is why I started running a thank you ad for my store earlier this year. For two days post-purchase, new customers see an ad featuring a 30-second video of me personally thanking them for their business. It has generated significantly more engagement and organic reach per impression than any other ad I’ve ever run.

My objective with this ad was to build brand loyalty and increase customer satisfaction, but surprisingly it’s also turned a large number of first-time customers into repeat customers within two days of their first purchase.

5. Existing Customer New Product Ads

As I said in the previous section, business owners often spend enough marketing resources on their existing customers. It's amazing considering the probability of generating a sale from a new customer is between 5-20% while the probability of making a sale from an existing customer is between 60-70%.

What’s even more amazing is the fact that repeat customers spend an average of 33% more than new ones and 80% of your future profits will come from just 20% of your existing customers.

Given the data about repeat customers, it’s a no brainer that when you roll out a new product the first ad you run should be a new product announcement ad targeting your existing customers. Considering using the copy of this ad show appreciation and offer an exclusive reward. Everyone wants to feel important and valued!

6. New Traffic Generation Ads

Retargeting is great, but unless you are driving high-quality traffic to your site, it won’t be very effective. It's always a good idea to have a Facebook campaign driving potential new customers to your store. I call this type of campaign a first touch point ad, as it’s likely the first time the person viewing the ad has heard of your business.

This type of ad will typically have lower CTRs (click through rate) and higher CPCs (cost per click) than retargeting campaigns because you don't know as much about the people viewing your ads. However, there are several ways that you can decrease the cost and improve the performance of a first touch point ad.

Start With A Lookalike Audience

If you have an existing customer or prospect list, you can easily import that into the Ads Manager as a new custom audience. Once that audience is ready you can use it to create a lookalike audience of 2-20M people. This new audience will contain Facebook users who most closely match your existing customers, making them easier to target.

Use Graph Search and Audience Insights

Facebook provides advertisers with a wide variety of powerful free tools. Audience insights allow you to discover a wealth of demographic, behavioral and interest data on all Facebook users. You can make this data more useful by filtering the search by specific pages, interests, locations, and demographics.

You can learn more about your potential target audience by inputing your competitor’s pages into Audience Insights. This search will return an incredible amount of data about the Facebook users who like your competitor’s pages, which you can use to target your first Facebook ads.

A/B Test

It’s always a good idea to A/B test your Facebook ads, regardless of the type of ad, but it is critical to test your first touch point ads. For a new campaign, create 2-3 copy options and 2-3 creative options. Test these variations on multiple audiences.

You don't need to spend a lot of cash to do this right. You can spend a few dollars a day on each variation for a week and then analyze the results. Upon analyzing the data, you can ramp up the spending for your best performing copy, creative, and audience.

To successfully get started with Facebook advertising start small, experiment, measure results and iterate. The 6 types of ads mentioned in this article can act as a foundation for you to build your business’s long-term Facebook marketing strategy. Now stop reading and start testing!